Losing the Forest Through the Trees: Bringing the Goals of the OA Movement Back into Focus

After looking through this year’s OA Week events, I made a note to come back to a few events like “All research results should be made public. CHANGE MY MIND!”. While there were other events that were both eye-catching and worthwhile in the events roster, there was a noticeable lack of content on furthering the end goals of making research open, specifically goals like driving the impact of research and research capacity development. So much around OA has moved on these past few years and yet our industry might be losing the forest for the trees. Many of the conversations happening in connection to this year’s OA Week are useful, but the debate over business models and commercial v. non-profit philosophies might come at the expense of other important issues. Impact is cited as a benefit of making research open in practically every presentation on OA but what could be accomplished if there was more energy going into discussions across organizations about new ways to drive and make the most of the increased impact of research in an OA world? It is progress that equity has become recognized as an area that needs more work within the OA movement, yet there is only one event dedicated to the topic of equity (and it was limited to OERs) and there were no events listed through the OA Week events page around capacity-building. Bringing the conversation back around to the goals of research impact and capacity development (among others), would pay important dividends.

Research impact is largely being driven and tracked in silos, and with the OA movement having success in the growth of open content, there could be real benefits to building bridges across those silos. Academic publishers are increasingly taking steps to enhance the impact of research in their portfolios, current efforts largely are centered around:

• Citation Metrics and Research Impact Metrics: Publishers put a huge amount of resource and expertise into disseminating content and making it discoverable. They increasingly work with platforms like Altmetric and PlumX to drive and track the attention research outputs receive across social media, news outlets, and policy documents, providing insights into their broader impact beyond traditional citations.
• Making Research More Accessible: Publishers are investing in resources and platforms to help researchers communicate their findings more effectively, such as training in science communication and the use of multimedia tools to communicate their research across different channels.
• Publishing Partnerships: Collaborations with universities, research organizations, and funding bodies have the benefit of connecting research to broader audiences and supporting emerging research fields.
• Publishing to Support Areas of Societal Need: Many publishers have put more effort into research related to the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and/or signed the SDG Publishers Compact.

These actions reflect a growing recognition of the need to adapt to the evolving landscape of research impact but the touch points with universities beyond the library are just scratching the surface. Reports like the OCLC’s Social Interoperability in Research Support and ITHAKA’s The Senior Research Officer are very helpful for demystifying various parts of the research enterprise and point to opportunities for touchpoints between the work being done to further the impact of research in various corners. It would be valuable and interesting to see the ongoing discussions between libraries, funders, publishers, and infrastructure groups focus on breaking down silos to further the impact of research and better realize an aim of the OA movement.

There are also opportunities to break down silos between the Global North and South as a result of the OA movement, with research capacity building noted as an important tool in doing so. Two weeks ago, in advance of the 2^nd Global Summit on Diamond OA, 6 Principles in Diamond OA were released. Of the 6 principles, Principle 5 focuses on capacity building and empowerment. The evolution of Diamond OA has been worth paying attention to, especially as challenges to other OA models continue to mount and the Summit and the Global Diamond Open Access Alliance get off the ground. There is plenty to pay attention to from the different threads of the meetings and discussion, but it is heartening that these newer community approaches are bringing capacity-building more squarely into the conversation. As noted, “These initiatives collectively aim to democratize access to research, enhance visibility, and foster collaboration, ultimately building research capacity across disciplines and regions.”

Research capacity building can sometimes be seen as a local effort and therefore fall by the wayside in some of the more entrenched OA discussions happening at a global level. However, I remain hopeful that we will see more discussion around how the OA movement can contribute in this area, in ways that are either scalable or more broadly applicable. Research4Life has been one of the main vehicles for this work to date, from the publisher perspective at least. As the needs around access have become slightly less acute with the rise of open content, the organization has updated their strategic direction to put more energy towards capacity development.  The results of these efforts are laudable and point to how these initial aims of the OA movement are more within reach than ever. As Daniel Dollar noted in this Scholarly Kitchen post, “A recent study by World Intellectual Property Organization, the University of the Bundeswehr Munich, and the German Economic Institute highlights this impact quantitatively, noting a 75% increase in scientific output and a 20% rise in involvement in international clinical trials from Research4Life institutions since the launch of the partnership in 2001.” However, he goes on to comment that the “success and, more critically, the unrealized potential of Research4Life and similar initiatives should serve as a call for increased backing of the equity goals that are at the heart of Research4Life’s work.” “Dollar suggests more engagement with Ministries of Education, but it is difficult to know how and where to start these conversations with many organizations. Creating touchpoints with these stakeholders in these cross-industry forums and special events may provide an opening for future collaboration, as just one example.  

The evidence that breaking down access barriers leads to measurable increases in research output and international collaboration keeps mounting. The success in open content growth proves how much can be accomplished when stakeholders share a common goal and should embolden us to tackle the next frontier: maximizing the impact of research and building global research capacity in meaningful ways. After all, making research open was never the end goal – it was always about maximizing the potential of that research to advance knowledge and benefit society. I eagerly look forward to conversations and initiatives that reflect that broader vision.

[written by Brigitte Shull, Gold Leaf]